Why do countries need capitals?
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Because there needs to be someplace for their leader to reside, for their legislature and other government organizations/departments to be based. There needs to be a place for foreign governments to go to negotiate and cooperate by setting up embassies. It makes sense for them to be centrally located.
Because as proper nouns it would be weird if they all started with lower-case letters, like america or china or brazil or the vatican.
Plus sometimes they’re the first word in a sentence which is another time they would need a capital.
Capitals aren’t typically decided and then government moves there, governments centralize power by nature and then we decided on the word ‘Capital’ to denote the place where the highest powers of government reside.
Before country lines were drawn, there were still powerful tribes that controlled a territory, even if they were nomadic, there was still a place where you would go talk to the chief.
Once tribes were no longer nomadic the chiefs would always have their favorite residence, and as soon as that happens you have people who want to be near the home of power for many different reasons. This increase in population near the seat of power leads to more infrastructure needed, more defense against raiders, more resources and you start developing from a tribal village to a city.
In the US, the idea of a capital had been around for ages and it was planned, but it wasn’t always Washington DC.
http://www.history.com/.amp/news/8-forgotten-capitals-of-the-united-states
If every single government decision had to be mailed between cities every time it was edited, then nothing would ever get done. It makes sense to have all of the infrastructure and personnel in the same area.
If you’re going to have a centralized government, you’re going to need to put the official government facilities and personnel somewhere.
It’s akin to asking why a home has a master bedroom or why office buildings have conference rooms.
Because we like to use the big letters when naming places? Seems disrespectful to call it uruguay…
A country is a proper noun. Proper nouns start with capital letters.
If you meant “capit**o**ls”, that is where the seat of government lies, where the legislature meets, where the high court resides, and much of the other apparatus of government.
Its a matter of proximity speeding decision making and actions being taken.
While many things that governments do, involve communications being sent in the normal fashion, there are some discussions that will always have to be conducted in person, either for the sake of transparency (for example, the affairs of Parliament in the UK), or for the sake of maintaining operational security in the event of a crisis (meetings between secret intelligence service, law enforcement and government ministers during terror attacks and the like).
When decisions need making quickly, as in the example of meetings between the intelligence services, police, and government ministers during a terror attack, or meetings between the intelligence services, armed services representatives and government during a war, the nature of the communications between the heads of the branches of government involved, is often such that doing it remotely takes too long, and exposes the information within those communications, to too much risk of being distributed more broadly than is necessarily safe.
In times of crisis, it is often necessary to ensure that only the people you want to know a thing, know the thing. The best way to ensure that, is to gather those people and only those people in one spot, and have them work things out between them, each going away with a clear idea of what they are doing, without exposing the communication to outside observation.
This hasn’t REALLY changed that much in a good long time, as reasons for having a capital go. The only difference is that this has become the primary reason, whereas the main reason used to be having a place where the Queen or King could be secured in place, with access to their most important subjects, its now more of an issue of efficiency in communication between parts of a government.
Unfortunately, there are those who see it as more than that, as being a place to centralise an awful lot of non-governmental power, most of it financial, and wielded in a manner which actively harms people who actually work for a living.
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